There is a respectable peacetime economic case for closing the Port Talbot blast furnaces and ceasing production of basic oxygen steel (BOS) in the United Kingdom and it is set out by the leading trade economist Catherine McBride. She shows how much British steel-making of any type has declined by volume, and how chronically dependent what remains is upon imported raw materials. She also explains how much EAF – electric arc furnace – steel production from recycled scrap has increased worldwide: for example, 70% of American steel in 2022 came from that source. Finally, she shows how globally dominant China and India have become in BOS, as witness 90% of China’s one billion ton steel production in 2022. China and India have massive economies of scale, and also access to domestically controlled raw materials, giving end-to-end control: in the Chinese case, both coking coal and iron ore, and in the Indian case, iron ore but with need to import coking coal. In contrast, the U.K. currently has to import both ore and coking coal at scale to feed the condemned blast furnaces.
While neither of the Asian giants exports much primary steel – in the Chinese case, only 40 million of 1 billion tons produced – both are major suppliers of steel products. The U.K. buys more steel products from China than from anywhere else, and therein begin the problems. “While the U.K. doesn’t matter to China, China matters to us,” McBride observes sharply.
There is an unrespectable case for closing the Port Talbot blast furnaces and replacing them with EAFs. It is the one which the Government supports and, with a half billion pound bung, proposes to pay Tata Steel to effect: you can be sure that it wouldn’t do it otherwise. This is the claim of some contribution on the fantasy road to ‘Net Zero’ where the harder you try the more you fail.
However, in two major reports, the iron and steel trades unions have blown that alleged ‘Net Zero’ gain out of the water, pointing to the obvious: BOS steel not produced in Port Talbot will be produced elsewhere and imported to this country. So there is zero reduction to global carbon dioxide emissions and there is the addition of emissions from ocean transport. Without pig iron, there is also loss of full-spectrum virgin steels capability, loss of high quality jobs and the social devastation of lives in South Wales. The unions’ plan is on the right side of history and should simply go further: ignore the ‘Net Zero’ targets and focus, on national security grounds, on securing a domestic balance of BOS and EAF production. France and Germany both have a 70/30 split, for example. The unions plainly understand the industry better than any civil servant or think tank genuflecting to Net Zero targets.
Therefore, this is the moment when the music stops. The Port Talbot closure harshly exposes the costs of luxury ‘green’ beliefs as we enter the second phase of a global war. It is a war of different theatres and modes of conflict: simultaneously ‘hot’ (kinetic) in Ukraine, the Middle East and with Taiwan threatened; ‘cold’ (economic) with China, Russia and Iran; and ‘grey’ (psychological, cyber and subversive) with all the enemies of the Free World. Major recent statements by NATO’s Military Committee Chairman, the Head of the Army (and Norwegian and Swedish CDSs) and the Defence Secretary finally inform the public of these inconvenient facts. This is no drill.
These concerns touch upon the question of Port Talbot directly and add to the many powerful objections to the closure decision. It must be reversed – we cannot be dependent on imports for the full range of necessary steels to rebuild our arsenals – the Navy first and foremost – and most ridiculously, we cannot be dependent for them on our global antagonists. China’s coal-fired economy is why it can readily build its new navy, just as we once did and must again.
Catherine McBride’s primary argument for replacing BOS steelmaking with EAF is concern about reliance on imported strategic raw materials. However she also observes that U.K. electricity costs are among the most expensive in the world and this destroys the case for EAFs as well, or for any unsubsidised steel production in the U.K. at all. EAFs require abundant and stable electricity supplies, such as they have in the USA. And the cause of the U.K.’s crippling electricity price? Net Zero. So the issue is not BOS versus EAF steel: it’s Net Zero’s all pervasive toxicity, poisoning U.K. power generation.
In our ‘pre-war’ world, what must change? First secure the grid. With news of delays to Qatari LNG shipments, upon whose regular arrival at Milford Haven we depend, U.K. grid security and stability are left dangling precariously on two threads: interconnector imports and undersea gas pipelines, which the Russian Navy’s Special Submarine Operations force (GUGI) could easily interdict. All offshore infrastructure with supply pipes and wires are similarly vulnerable, of course. However, gas is dangerously central to our energy security, given that uncontrollable wind and solar simply destabilise the grid – beware the Dunkelflaute my beamish boy! Therefore grid security has to be assured, mainly by the only large remaining firm power source, combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power stations. The U.K.’s main gas storage site at Rough, which re-opened in 2022, has been doubled in capacity to 54 billion cubic feet of gas in 2023; but the obvious step of permitting Bowland Shale fracking remains blocked.
Therefore, by elimination, there is only one broad highway to safety. It is to follow Germany, erstwhile home of deep green eco-politics, which, in a hard-headed way after the disaster of the Energiewende, is moving back to coal – yes coal – but not coal as you think you know it. Advanced ultra super-critical technology (AUSC) is clean coal that achieves close to 50% thermal efficiency.
In tandem, we must also fix our import vulnerabilities in coal and iron ore. Take a deep breath as that reality hits home.
For the U.K., this means re-opening South Wales premium hard coal and Nottingham deep mines, because we need domestic supplies both to power the grid cheaply and reliably once more – no form of nuclear will be made ready quickly enough, while GE’s AUSC plants are available today. (We will also need Cumbrian metallurgical coal to supply Port Talbot, so we can still have the full range of virgin steels.)
CCGTs can then be retired from base load and take on a supporting role as peaking power; consequently, a high-quality fuel should be used. We shall need to re-engage the wartime mentality of strategic stockpiling; and thank goodness that Sweden, currently on the threshold of entering NATO, will be on our side this time in terms of iron ore exports, unlike during the Second World War.
Recognising the strategic risk in renewables’ fragility leads to the inevitable conclusion that subsidy plugs and bungs – like the one given to Tata essentially to compensate for electricity costs driven uneconomically high by Net Zero, so it will build EAF at all – must be pulled.
“And what of our CO2 targets?” many outraged voices may wail. “What of Net Zero?” the subject which is on every lip but which few understand? The music stops there too. Now that we can explain why the Hansen 1988 ‘control knob’ CO2-global temperature close-coupling hypothesis doesn’t hold, which is the major finding of 35 years of global climate systems research, but instead is vitiated by two fundamental errors in its theory of knowledge and by a major technical error by the IPCC (see Archimedes’ Fulcrum pp. 9-13), we can more accurately assess the risks from anthropogenic CO2 emissions to global security, relative to other risks, and adapt to them. As ‘wicked’ problems, they cannot be mitigated because there is no sufficient understanding of cause and effect. Outside the closed belief-systems of eco-zealotry, in the real hard world of geopolitics, anthropogenic CO2 risks rank pretty low and, for our adversaries, not at all. They weaponise our ‘green’ thinking against us.
The reversal of the Port Talbot blast furnace closure on national security grounds, a return to domestic coal for power and for steel, pulling the subsidies plug on renewables-that-are-not, and jettisoning of Net Zero targets – so glibly conjured into being on the back of shoddy data, and unthinkingly nodded into law to give Mrs May a semblance of a ‘legacy’ – will be the signal that reason and clear-thinking have returned. We shall once again have economics as if the defence of the realm, the wealth and health of its citizens, and indeed the health of the environment too – which is no paradox – really mattered. That true environmental visionary E.F. Schumacher was never apologetic about his career with the National Coal Board. No more should we be about clean coal now, as the noises of eco-zealotry in the isle subside and we awaken as if from a dream.
This article was first published by Net Zero Watch. Sign up to the NZW newsletter here.
Dr. Gwythian Prins is Research Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics, where he directed the Mackinder Programme, 2002-13. He was convenor of the Hartwell Group on Climate Change and Energy 2007-19, and has served as adviser to both the Japanese and (former) Czechoslovak Governments on energy and environment issues. Before that he was the first security consultant to the Hadley Centre for Climate Predication and Research at the Meteorological Office, loaned by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency of the MoD (1999-2001). Afterwards, he was a member of the Chiefs of the Defence Staff’s Strategy Advisory Panel.
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“She also explains how much EAF – electric arc furnace ”
And WHAT powers said ELECTRIC arc furnaces?
Wishes and Unicorn farts
Been screaming about the save the planet cult to everyone for decades. Always been at pains to point out that I would happily ignore all the nonsense, were it not for the huge amount of pain and hardship it is causing and will continue to cause.
Ah well. At least I can look at myself in the mirror and know I tried, but it still stings.
This an extensive article. ——Those of us who have been looking into this climate/energy issue for a long time have realised for ages what is going on and it has mostly NOTHING to do with the climate. The climate is the excuse for the Eco Socialist Politics. We know that the wealthy western governments (apart from Trump) have fully signed up to this “Sustainable Development” UN political agenda based on the Malthusian way of looking at the world. We in the prosperous west have allegedly used up more than our fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground and are to stop doing that and are fobbing our own citizens off with expensive unreliable energies and technologies that are not up to the job. The energy solutions are mostly niche technologies like wind and solar that cannot provide base load and On Demand energy. ———-Prosperity and well being is directly tied to price and availability of energy. ——By increasing the cost and availability of energy what western governments like the UK one are doing is telling its citizens that will take away their prosperity and lower their standard of living. ———All so they can pretend to save the planet.
Something as big as this isn’t the result of one group of people. It is the confluence of a number of interests.
Eco loons is one.
Socialists who love to tell everyone what to do is another.
Alternative energy lobbies is another.
And a very big one is UK-European establishments that have run the world for the last 200 years and have lost control of the major global oil and gas supplies who will do literally anything, including driving us all into poverty, to defend their global influence.
Any one of these interests by itself isn’t enough to drive such a massive project like Net Zero, but all of them coming together can and are.
Lets just call them the Global Government because control of the globe is what their politics is all about.
Looks like two thumbs down people think Global Governance is not on the cards, and the UN and WEF are all just hoping to make the world a better place.—–I feel sorry for you.
Ultimately the Sustainable Development gig is about Depopulation. This is a war being waged on numerous fronts.
Actual guns and bullets wars and now the new front – the war on food. Running alongside we have Nut Zero and to really cause trouble we had the C1984 which is shortly to be followed by Billy’s newest, Disease X.
When all of the above are firmly embedded what have we got? A poor, malnourished and therefore weak population. Disease X is released and of course it will require a “vaccine” only this one will be far more deadly.
Deagel’s population forecasts don’t seem so far-fetched anymore.
The De-Population idea came from the Likes of Erlich and Brown. John Kerry was a big fan of this Malthusian idea of too many people and not enough resources kind of garbage. The climate change issue came along and was seized upon by the left as another tool in their box of handy excuses for global government. Net Zero is the latest bag of s..t they are unleashing on an unsuspecting public, and guess what? ——-Not a single MP asked any questions about what this would mean in 2019 and it was simply waved through. —-No one actually put their hand up and said “Eh, how much is this going to cost? Or “Are the technologies even available or can they even be invented? ——What is even crazier is that we have forced ourselves in law to do this. It is like me forcing myself in law to become a brain surgeon when I only drive a truck for a living. ——-Insanity
Good post.
Climate whatever :
Club of Rome “Limits to Growth” 1972.
“What is even crazier is that we have forced ourselves in law”
The rule of law applies only where it suits those in charge as I have posted many times.
The Rule of Law has been so grossly abused these last four years as to now be a complete fiction.
They don’t know the cost. They don’t know if it can be done, but they are forcing the country in law to do it. ——–I came to the conclusion many years ago that western politicians all suffering from the Liberal Progressive disease and who are fully paid up members of the global government in waiting are utterly poisoned with contempt for their own citizens who they see as simply an inconvenience.
Perhaps the military will wake up, and decide that it’s a bad idea to rely on the potential enemies for supply of equipment of whatever kind. A bit like the establishment of the Forestry Commission, but perhaps more like a modern (i.e. renamed) Coal commission.
No chance the military waking up they are the most stupid and compliant of the lot.
“Perhaps” being the operative word.
Imagine that….A woke military coupe de etat!
It will take 10s of thousands of ppl dying due to a grid failure in a January freeze before this ceases. Unfortunately the madness is that ingrained all by a fat communist named Michael Mann and his ridiculous hockey stick.
Re open the coalmines (the ones that still can be, as most where capped and flooded to stop them ever being used again!) and create a new department called ‘The green fuel executive’
Do not use the word coal, anywhere!
then all the green lefty idiots will campaign for its progress! Simple, sort the problem with the words they are in favour of hearing
“the ones that still can be, as most where capped and flooded to stop them ever being used again!”
The suggestion that coal mines cannot be re-opened is a fiction albeit one that the C in C’s may feel emboldened to use.
True, but it does make it a lot more expensive and so not as financially viable.
Also,whilst sinking new shafts a lot of careful geography has to be done to make sure of not flooding your new pit by hitting an old flooded tunnel
“steel production from recycled scrap has increased worldwide”
Do you see the problem I see here?
If everyone start using scrap steel there won’t be enough to go around and the price will rise! Not only that, you never have more scrap than new steel as most steel is still in use, you require new steel for a percentage of it to eventually be scrapped, eventually!
It’s a pointless argument to make unfortunately these lunatics are beyond reason. Their real desire is to kill ppl.
This is the crux of the matter. As you imply, Dings, at some point you’re going to run out of new steel to scrap. Then again, in ‘their’ thinking, there probably won’t be the demand because there will be so few people about to demand anything. Maybe that is the point.
No problem. We can harvest rust from the soil using eco-friendly Community sieves, and recycle it into steel using renewable energy. Provided, of course, that we outsource the strip-mining of soil abroad rather than damaging the Natcheral Envirinmint. I imagine we could make hydrogen the same way once the technology comes along.
Next step — Food Security!
No problem. We can harvest bacteria from the soil using eco-friendly filters…
“No problem. We can harvest rust from the soil using eco-friendly Community sieves”
now i see what the elite envisage!
Something like this, where peasants and serfs dig out the materials needed to make the private jets used by the elites!
They would just import cheap labour like they’re doing now, keeps the plebs in a low wage cycle, while sending Brits into some meat grinder. They have killed two birds with one stone there — Depopulation — Demographic decline.
“It is a war of different theatres and modes of conflict: simultaneously ‘hot’ (kinetic) in Ukraine, the Middle East and with Taiwan threatened; ‘cold’ (economic) with China, Russia and Iran; and ‘grey’ (psychological, cyber and subversive) with all the enemies of the Free World.”
The “Free World” is anything but.
We are being driven into totally unnecessary wars from MICs and the Global Bankers. The latter looking to distract from the controlled demolition of the debt economy that has fueled the wealth transfer to the bankster cartels and their cadre of billionaires below them in their dream of a multipolar global financial reset into the neofeudal Technocracy. They have been behind or bankrolled both sides of all major conflicts since the Nepoleonic Wars so it’s hard to get excited about Steel production for the next set of incited wars.
Nailed it
Reminds me of the video by Ivor Cummins ‘Are All Wars Bankers Wars’….It is claimed the Reichsmark was the real threat…Not Hitler? This is a deep rabbit hole to put out there.
Dr Prins appears to live in a parallel universe, where we have sensible politicians and Civil Servants, who understand that their primary duty is Defence of the Realm and that everything they do should be underpinned by that responsibility.
Then take a look at the f’wits we have in Parliament and the Eco Nutter Propagandists who infest the Civil Service (and public sector in general) ….. and start learning Chinese; various Indian languages; or Russian …..and/or studying the Koran.
Yes, the voice of reason has long been absent from any serious policy making. If you’re planning to decimate an economy and society then the last thing you want to do is save jobs, re-open the coal mines, fire up the old power stations, get active with our own strategic gas reserve etc. If anything, what they are doing to us is treason. The whole shoddy lot of them need to be arrested and put on trial. Probably not going to happen but I like to think it would.
Being arrested and tried is far too slow and ineffective, they need to be reduced to their component atoms by any means necessary. Strung up and left to rot is one means.
“Treason.”
A word I have been lobbing about extensively for a couple or more years on DS.
I am all for going after the man made climate change hoax and Net Zero, but using and rationalising their irresponsible lust for war to make the case against it is nutty and net negative.
It exposes their ‘own goal’ though.
Excellent article
This level of strategic thinking does not occur in Cabinet
CO2 at 500 parts per million is a Red Herring
The concentration makes it irrelevant
The equivalent of covering 5 meters of a 10,000 metre run
too dispersed
CO2 = WEALTH. ——-Not Temperature. ————“One has to free oneself from the illusion that Climate Policy is Environmental Policy anymore. We redistribute the worlds wealth via Climate Policy” ——Edenhoffer IPCC. ——It is obvious what he means. The wealthiest emit the most CO2 because they have the biggest houses and appliances, cars and fly about in planes more, and the poor have very little of that. Carbon taxes etc allow government to fleece money from the wealthier people and countries and pass it on to poorer people and countries. ——–Eco Socialism with climate as the excuse, which mainstream media keep reminding us virtually on a daily basis.
An absolutely brilliant and clearly presented expose of Nut Zero.
When the C in C’s (Comedians in Charge) where muttering about conscription a few days ago I made the point that it was a waste of time because with Port Talbot gone we no longer had the means to produce arms. Dr Prins spells this out with brutal clarity.
When the pits were closed 30-35 years ago I told everybody who would listen that within 50 years we would be reopening them. OK, my timescale was slightly adrift but that prediction is proving to be valid.
What conclusion must be drawn if the C in C’s fail to act in a manner outlined by Dr Prins?
We are being set up for invasion or destruction by a superior military power.
Perhaps a population of 25 million as predicted by the Deagel forecasts by 2025 is still on the cards.
We are supposedly being asked if we will fight for our country. ——Except we don’t have a country anymore. It is just a Region.
I will fight for my country. I love my country and always will.
Obviously the first battle would require the destruction of the treasonous barstewards who have got us in to a state where taking up arms is the only option. Ain’t that right Fishy?
Yes I used to feel like that too, but our country has been removed. It does not exist anymore. ——In 1950 it existed. Today it is not Britain. It is just an outpost of the global community. It is being overun with the barbarian hordes, and soon our daughters will be made to wear headscarves and told what music they can listen to. —–I will NOT fight for that hell hole.
In our pre-war world, what must change?
If war cannot be fought on Nut Zero, we are surely in a non-war world.
In the interwar period, the original aim of the founders of the EU, Monnet and Salter, was to prevent war. That is, a repeat of the Great War. Such a war needed vast amounts of coal and steel. The first part of their plan, though actually obsolete for obvious reasons when implemented in 1951, was to create the European Coal and Steel Community. This took control of French and German production out of the hands of sovereign states.
If the argument is to be made that today the UK should control her own coal and steel production to manufacture all those ships and guns, we are back in the world of 1914. All those interwar efforts of such notables like Harold Laski and Vera Brittain to prevent war just a noise, signifying nothing. Unlike in 1914, Ukraine has shown that countries today have no large pool of manpower of miliary age and would run out of soldiers if ‘victory’ wasn’t achieved quickly.
Has anyone asked Bhutan or Bolivia if they are in a pre-war world?
Excellent article. However, don’t expect any UK government to change course, they seem determined to drive us all into the ground.